During the past three years
or so, I have been stripping my files of junk and other items that appeared to
be
‘good stuff’ when collected many years ago but
now have questionable value. More often
than not, I find myself asking the question “why did I ever keep this?” On occasion, however, I uncover something
that still interests me and probably may interest the casual reader. Such is this item.
After the war ended and I was
back to earning a living, I came across an article in Astounding
Science-Fiction, a magazine edited by the most capable John W. Campbell,
Jr. In an editorial, he speculates on
what might occur if a post-WW-II device suddenly appeared in the skies over a
military base during the 1920s and the military investigate with the hopes of
identifying and using the advanced technology.
An interesting side issue of
this article is that it describes a technical problem of about thirty year’s
difference (1920s vs. 1950s) and, in so doing, describes post-war technology
which, in turn, has matured into the Third Millennium, a period of an
additional fifty years or so. Obviously,
the reader must keep in mind that as advanced as the 1950s technology appears to
the 1920s observers; the technological differences are merely a hill when
compared to the mountainous changes of the past fifty years. With that charge, on to John Campbell and his
editorial:
“The proposition involving
the science-fiction hero who captures an enemy device, brings it home, copies
it and puts it into production is being abandoned in modern stories. But the actual difficulty of such a problem
is always interesting and worthy of consideration. Only recently has Earth’s own technology
reached the point where such copying is not possible; today it is definitely
impossible in a large field of devices.
“Let’s first consider t5his
situation: Time: About 1920. Place:
An American Army Air Base. Action:
High overhead a small airplane tears across the sky with a high, thin
whistle. Ground observers, after tracking
it for a minute or so – during which time it has passed out of sight – report
incredulously that it was doing between nine hundred and fifty and one thousand
miles per hour. It circles back , slows
abruptly as the whistle dies out, and makes a hot, deadstick landing. Investigators reach the cornfield where it
land- ed, and find it ninety percent intact – and one hundred percent
impossible. Swept-back wings, no tail, automatic
control equipment of incredibly advanced design, are all understandable in so
far as function intended goes. But the metal alloys used make no sense to the
metallurgists when they go to work on them.
The ‘engine,’ moreover, is simply, starkly insane. The only indication of anything that might
remotely be considered an engine is a single, open tube – really open; open at
both ends. But the empty fuel tank had
tubes leading into some sort of small jets in that pipe. The athodyd being unheard of in 1920, the
thing is senseless. Filling the fuel
tanks simply causes a hot fire that must be extinguished quickly to prevent burning
out the tube. The fact that this is a
guided missile intended for launching from a four-hundred-mile-an-hour bomber
makes the situation a little difficult for the 1920 technologists; the athodyd
won’t start functioning below two hundred fifty m.p.h., and nothing on Earth
could reach that speed in 1920.
“Meanwhile, the Signal Corps
experts are going equally chittery trying to figure out the controls. First off, the plane’s markings were clearly
an advanced United States Army design.
Many equipment parts bore United States Army Signal Corps markings and
serial numbers. [If you are wondering
why the Signal Corps was involved with aircraft, the original contract to
purchase aircraft from the Wright Brothers was signed by the Signal
Corps]. But the equipment inside is not
only of advanced design, it’s of meaningless design. The idea of printed circuits is fascinating,
but understandable if not reproducible.
Pentode amplifiers the size of a peanut are fascinating, not
reproducible, and only vaguely understandable.
For one thing, the filament isn’t used at all; an indirectly heated
cathode is a new item to them. However,
the items that really stop them are several varieties of gadgets, all about the
same size, but of violently different characteristics. There are units one eighth inch in diameter
by about three fourths long that have resistance varying from one hundred to
ten million ohms. Incredible, but
true. Others have infinite resistance
and are condensers of capacity so high for their tiny size as to be
unbelievable. Still others have three
leads, and, opened, seem to be crystal detectors – understandable – but are
amplifiers, which doesn’t make sense.
They also turn out to be nonreproducible. They are simple mechanical structures, using
the very unusual element germanium, in the crystals. But the chemical expert’s best purified
germanium won’t work when a reproduction is tried. (You’ve got to have the right amount of the
right impurity introduced in the right way.
Techniques in the 20s weren’t up to it).
“Furthermore, there’s a tube
that’s obviously a triode oscillator, but the frequency involved is so high as
to be detectable only when using crystal detectors from the plane’s own
equipment. The circuit, too, doesn’t
make sense to the radio engineers, though the physicists from the Bureau of
Standards finally figured it out. (It’s
a tuned-line oscillator operating at about four-hundred megacycles. The physicists had to go back to Hertz’s
original work with tuned-rod oscillators to get a glimpse of what went
on.) They can’t reproduce the tube, and
no tube they can make will oscillate in the circuit used.
“Finally, there’s another
group of equipments they’ve simply agreed to forget. It seems to center around a permanent magnet
of fantastic power which embraces a copper block drilled with holes of odd
sizes, having a central electron-emitting rod through it. The magnetron is bad enough – obviously
beyond reproduction, since the cathode can’t be duplicated, the magnet can’t be
duplicated, and the metal-to-glass seals are beyond any available
technique. But the associated equipment
is worse. There is a collection of
rectangular pipes made of heavy silver-plated copper. The pipes contain nothing, carry nothing, and
appear totally meaningless. This time
the physicists are completely stumped.
(Wave-guide theory is a recent development; without some basic leads,
and understanding of the order of frequencies involved, they’d never get
there.) And worst of all, the physicists
find that several bits of the equipment contain radioactive material.
They know about radium,
uranium, thorium, et cetera. But – this
is highly radioactive, and it’s cobalt. But cobalt isn’t radioactive! But this is, and it is cobalt. (It’s the transmit-receive tube; the radio-cobalt
is used to keep it ready to ionize easily and instantly.) They also find radioactive emanations from
much of the plane’s material, with faint indications that half the elements in
the chemical table are radioactive – which is arrant nonsense! (The guided missile had been flown through
the fringes of the atomic bomb test gathering report data.)
“In summary, the
aerodynamicists report that the tailless monstrosity is interesting, but the principles
of it’s design are confusing. The engine
group report the ‘engine,’ so-called, can’t be the engine. It was thought for a while that it might be a
rocket, but since both ends are, and always were, wide open, it can’t possibly
be a rocket. The radio experts of the
Signal Corps agree that some of the equipment is an immeasurably advanced type
of radio apparatus, but the design is so advanced that it is futile to study
it. It can’t br reproduced, and involves
principles evidently several centuries ahead of the knowledge of 1920 – so
advanced that the missing, intermediate steps are too many to be bridged. The mystery electronic equipment, called
Equipment Group X, remains simply mysterious, save that, in some way, it
involves a receiver operating on an unknown, but very high frequency. (By which they meant not the ten thousand
megacycle input but the ‘low’ frequency intermediate frequency amplifier,
operating at only thirty megacycles.
Having no means of generating thirty megacycles at that time, they could
only say it was higher than the highest available. And they didn’t, of course, recognize the ten
kilomegacycle RF head as a receiver at5 all.)
“The physicists would be
inclined to ascribe it to Mars, Venus or any other non-terrestrial planet, if
it weren’t for the obvious Signal Corps markings. Since terrestrial cobalt isn’t radioactive,
and the cobalt in this ship is –
“But anyway, the reports can
only be tucked in the ‘File and Forget’ division. About the only thing they can lift out of
that piece of marvelous equipment is the secret of making good, small,
high-resistance electronic resisters.
The chemists and the physicists did crack that one, and it’s the answer
to an electronicist’s prayers; the tiny resistors are not wound with sub-microscopic
resistance wire, as was at first believed – they’re little ceramic tubes filled
with a composition of clay and graphite which is such an extremely bad
conductor that it does the job beautifully.
By varying the composition, resistors of a standard size can range from
one ohm to one hundred million.
“At that, our 1920 group was
really lucky. Suppose the item that fell
through a time-fault had carried an atomic warhead. If it didn’t go off, it would have presented
the physicists with two of the most dangerous, utterly inexplicable lumps of
matter imaginable. Pure U-235 or pure
plutonium – that would have driven the chemists mad! – before they’d even
discovered synthetic radioactivity. They
would have been certain to kill themselves by bringing those two masses too
close to each other, though out of the bomb mechanism, they wouldn’t have
exploded.
“But – write your own ticket,
in your own special field. Let 1920, or
1910, or 1890 try to understand the functioning of any one of your modern gadgets. Even though, in those years, first-rate
scientists with a full understanding of scientific methodology, and with fairly
complete laboratory equipments, were available!”
The cited John Campbell
editorial was prepared for publication in the October 1, 1948 issue of
Astounding Science Fiction and relates a “what if” scenario based on an
improbable time-warp that delivered a atom bomb testing athodyd from the
post-war period to the 1920s. While
technically entertaining, even John Campbell would admit it was a “what if”
plot, extremely unlikely to happen.
Not so entertaining was an
incident involving John Campbell that occurred during the war and almost closed
the publication and threatened worse to John and the staff.
In January 1990, Analog
Magazine published an article, “Sixty Astounding Years,” authored by Michael F.
Flynn and William R. Warren, reprinting a January 1930 article introducing
Astounding Stories magazine. Pulp
magazines with stories on science fiction were popular during the pre-war
period and while they carried science fiction stories and articles there were
as many, if not more, properly termed fantasy or horror. The time was ripe for a true science fiction
magazine and Astounding Stories was born.
The January 1930
Introduction included:
“What are astounding stories?
“Well, if you lived in Europe
in 1490, and someone told you the Earth was round and moved around the Sun – that would have been an
astounding story.
“Or if you lived in 1840, and were told that some day
men a thousand miles apart would be able to talk
to each other through a little wire – or without any wire at all – that would
have been another.
“Or if in 1900, they predicted ocean-crossing
airplanes and submarines, world-girdling Zeppelins, sixty-story buildings, radio, metal that can be made to resist
gravity and float in the air – those would
have been other astounding stories.
“Today, time has gone by, and
all these things are commonplace. That
is the only real difference between the astounding and the commonplace – Time.
“Tomorrow more astounding
things are going to happen. Your
children, or their children, are going to take a trip to the Moon. They will be able to render themselves
invisible – a problem that has already been partly solved. They will be able to disintegrate their
bodies in New York
and reintegrate them in China
– and in a matter of seconds.
“Astounding? Indeed, yes.
“Impossible? Well television would have been impossible,
almost unthinkable, ten years ago.”
And so, the new Astounding
Stories was born in January 1930.
Ditching the then popular large magazine size, Astounding Stories was
published in a size approximating the size of the current Reader’s Digest and
became very popular, drawing top authors to its fold. Then, in 1944, a problem, related by the
authors in Analog Magazine, January 1990:
“It was on or about March 10, 1944, when
Counter Intelligence Corps agent Arthur E. Riley knocked on the doors of
Astounding Science Fiction’s Editor John W. Campbell., Jr., and demanded to
know what the hell was going on. The
March 1944 issue of Astounding had just hit the stands with the story,
“Deadline,” by Cleve Cartmill. Although
set on an ostensibly alien planet, involving an ostensibly alien war, the story
had contained some rather disquieting lines.
To wit:
‘They
get it (U-235) out of uranium ores by new atomic isotope separation methods;
they now have quantities measured in
pounds…They could end the war overnight with controlled U-235 bombs…So far they haven’t worked out any
way to control the explosion…’”
NOTE: The atomic
bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
Japan, August 6, 1945 after being
tested in the United States
on July 16, 1945
at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
“That was a bit too close to
the mark. Only a few people in the
country were supposed to know about isotope separation and the atomic bomb
effort, and Military Intelligence could figure out no way that a pulp magazine
could learn of it except through a security leak. Curiously, one of the CIC’s main concerns was
that the information contained in the story would leak into the Manhattan Project, since only a few people there had the
big picture.
“Finally, everyone admitted
that the ‘leak’ was knowledge available to ‘anyone with a smattering of science
and a fertile imagination.’ Although one
security officer suggested revoking Astounding’s postal privileges tantamount
to shutting the magazine down – cooler heads prevailed and the incident was
soon forgotten, except in the folklore of science fiction.”
In my essay, “Interesting
Science Facts,” additional information from the 1930 and 1990 articles has been
included as well as many pages of negative declarations by well-known
individuals on atomic energy and a multitude of other programs, including radio,
airplanes, missiles, warships and many others.
If I had to pick statements
or actions from among the many made during my lifetime that directly affected
my personal life, I would choose three:
- American Army officer, William (Billy) Mitchell, outspoken advocate of air power, when he demonstrated the ability of aerial bombing to sink battleships. (1921-1922)
- American Admiral Clark Woodward, when he declared, “As far as sinking a ship with a bomb is concerned, you just can’t do it.” (1939)
- Japanese aviator reporting, “Tora, Tora, Tora,” and the successful destruction of the United States Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941.
As to the future, astounding
stories yet to be told:
Space travel Manufacturing
in space
Computer intelligence Direct
mind – computer links
Cheap power Telepathy
And many more not even
imagined.
October 2004
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